Gravity Dash review - a solid but deeply familiar runner

Weighed down by history

Gravity Dash is a classically styled 2D endless runner with spike pits, saw blades and guillotines to jump over or duck under.

Developer Jedd Goble calls it "an ode to the classic runner, with a unique twist". That twist is the ability to flip gravity on its head with a double tap of the screen, so the ceiling becomes the floor and vice versa.

Of course, anyone who's followed smartphone gaming over the years will know that there's actually nothing unique about it.

Pulled back down to Earth

Looking back through the PG archives, 2010 alone contained Gravity Runner and Gravity Guy, both of which featured the exact same mechanic.

VVVVVV and Gravity Duck also feature a similar gravity system, albeit in a more open platformer style.

Gravity Dash isn't going to win you over with the freshness of its gameplay, then. But it is a reasonably tight runner, should you be craving yet another example of the form.

Manipulating the double-tap gravity system to flow through tricky moving gates and past perilous gaps is highly satisfying, and the difficulty level ramps up at a well-judged rate.

Holding me down

Gravity Dash's sense of familiarity can also be attributed to its presentation. There are clear traces of Super Meat Boy in the way Gravity Dash looks, from its blocky main character to the design of its brutal level furniture and some of its jaunty unlockable costumes.

Unfortunately, the one thing that hasn't been brought over from Team Meat's classic is a super slick frame rate.

It's not exactly stuttery, but the scenery doesn't quite fly by at the buttery-smooth rate that you might expect in a game this simple. I played the game on both an iPhone X and an iPad Air 2, so it doesn't seem to be hardware dependent.

All in all Gravity Dash is a solid endless runner that's fun to play and pleasant to look at, but everything from its visual style to its core 'twist' has been seen before.